Losing Sleep » Library

Still More CPL Web Site Goodness…

Chris — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:20:55 +0000

Yet even more CPL web site goodness.

Suggestion Box – Ask them to buy a book that you would like to read but they don’t have.
Nearby Schools – For each branch library the web site lists the nearby schools.
Events & Programs – What a vast improvement to the events page. On the old site it seemed near impossible to figure out what was going on. Now it’s easy to browse all the events going on at the different branches.
Random Great Stuff – Recommendations, popular searches, recent arrivals, NYT bestsellers

It just keeps getting better and better.

More CPL Website Goodness…

Chris — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:31:55 +0000

I’m such a library geek. I’ve been exploring the new CPL site and I’ve found more goodness locked away. While browsing the catalog I’ve found that some books have: reviews, summaries, excerpts and character information included in the catalog record (as well as being able to see the MARC record). All of this content seems to be brought to us from TLC (The Library Corporation) and Syndetic Solutions. The reviews include Booklist, School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly among others. The summary and excerpts are nice also (the excerpt was the entire 1st chapter for the books I checked, Sun of Suns and Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Let’s see if the catalog urls are persistant.) but I really would like to point to the character information. The character information contains much more than that, it also includes: annotations, awards, genres, topics, setting, time period and series. There’s a lot of information there. Right now I’m so happy I could cry. CPL has met and exceeded my expectations. I have some frustrations with CPL but they just made a huge deposite in my good will bank.

It Took Them Long Enough…

Chris — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:24:52 +0000

It took them long enough. I’ve been lamenting the state of CPL’s online presence for ages and they’ve finally updated and joined us in the 21st century. So far I’m REALLY liking their new site. Its got a nice look to it and I’m finding it fairly easy to navigate around. The catalog is a HUGE improvement over what they had before and you can even place holds on books (not to mention renewing books). I’m so happy to see CPL finally updating their site. They even have a blog! The one thing I have to gripe about is that there are no RSS feeds anywhere on the site that I can find. No RSS for the blog, new books, movies, etc…. That would have been the icing on the cake for me. They do have email notifications for new genre books (it says coming soon) so that’s at least something.

P.S. I’m blind. Right on the front page there is a box highlighting the CPL blog Beyond Words, and right next to that is a big fat RSS icon. I wasn’t wearing my glasses when I first took a look at the site (I don’t wear glasses) so that’s how I missed it. I’m going to subscribe right now.

My Dream Come True… A Library Video Game

Chris — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:03:38 +0000

During my education as a librarian I’ve been bemoaning the fact that there are no good video games on libraries. My dreams have been answered. The guys over at Joystiq have brought my attention to The Carnegie Mellon University Libraries Library Arcade. The arcade has two games: I’ll Get It and Within Range. The former is a game on answering reference questions and the latter is all about shelving book using the LOC Classification system. If only I had the shelving game when I was taking cataloging. I might have done better than a B.

General view of one of the classification yards of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, Chicago, Ill. (LOC)

Chris — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:56:44 +0000

¹ It seems that the Library of Congress is uploading photos to flickr. These are photos from the LOC Prints & Photographs Division. The photos have no known copyright and are downloadable at decent sizes (1024 x 768). There is some great stuff here for historical projects. So far they have about 3000 photos up (out of 14 million, that’s about 2%) and are supposed to be adding more. You can add descriptions, tags and notes to the pictures. The loc is crowdsourcing the photos to ease documentation. It’s a grand experiment.

General view of one of the classification yards of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, Chicago, Ill. (LOC) Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

Librarians… Old AND Tired.

Chris — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:44:28 +0000

My wife and I were watching ER tonight when a commercial came on for Fresh 105.9. I had to laugh. Maybe the Sony Digital Reader is “sexier than a librarian” but at least Sony doesn’t imply that librarians are old and tired.¹

OK. They never actually say the word librarian, but it is definitely implied.

LIS 768 Course Reflection

Chris — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:31:00 +0000

All in all I was fairly satisfied with the LIS 768 class. The topics were engaging and my classmates were amicable. Michael Stephens is an exciting teacher and has a great way of communicating his ideas to the students. One thing that I found disappointing was that at the beginning of the class Michael mentioned another similar class (in Arizona I think) that might join us in some of our projects. This never came to pass and I was really disappointed that we didn’t get to really test some of these technologies over a distance. I was looking forward to having a larger group of people to collaborate with, it’s too bad we could never do this.

Out of 10 stars I would give this class a 8.5.

On a side note… one thing I found annoying is the Meebo widget on the LIS 768 blog. As far as I can tell Michael Stephens was never available to chat, so why include a chat widget that will never be used?

LIS 768 Paper Abstract – The Digital Native

Chris — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 02:13:28 +0000

My final research paper for my LIS 768 class was an examination of the Digital Native and a recommendation for libraries (school specifically but public also) on ways to attract and cater to the Digital Native. I focused on three aspects of the digital native: learning, communication/socializing, and producing/consuming media. From the learning perspective I examined how the digital native approached the assimilation and synthesizing of information. From the communication/socializing aspect I examined how the Digital Native used new technologies and services to gather and collaborate with others. I also looked at some of the negatives of social networks (and how some of the dangers may be a bit overblown). Finally, from the producing/consuming media aspect I defines how the Digital Native used new technology to view media and how they seek out media rather than passively waiting for it to come to them (and how they share it).

To wrap it all up I made some suggestions for the school media specialist on how they might make their library friendlier to the new ways the the Digital Native learns and communicates.

Del.icio.us Tagging Post

Chris — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:48:40 +0000

I like Del.icio.us. I probably don’t use it the way it’s supposed to be used. I tend to use it like a web scrapbook. I put things there that I want to remember for later or things that I don’t have time to read but plan to get back to. It works pretty well for me and I tend to keep it pretty tidy, getting rid of stuff a month or two after I saved it. I’ll probably get rid of all the LIS768 tagged stuff once my class is completely over. There are a couple of things that I think Del.icio.us needs to do to improve their over all service.

Build in some kind of bibliographic control for tags. I’ve posted about this once before, there needs to be some kind of standard for tagging. Something like, no plurals, correcting spelling, etc…
They need to build in support for multi-word tags. It drives me crazy that everything has to be a single mass rather than two or more terms (i.e. “web 2.0″, “graphic novel”, “science fiction”, etc…). Other web 2.0 apps can do it, how come Del.icio.us can’t?
Design. I like the simple basic design of Del.icio.us but they need to do just a little bit more… Nothing fancy, but how about alternating shades of gray for each link so that it’s easier to differentiate between different links.

All in all Del.icio.us is a pretty useful tool. Supposedly there is going to be a redesign next year, but we’ll see about that…

Wiki Presentation.

Chris — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:19:40 +0000

All in all I would have to say that I really enjoyed putting together the presentation on Wikis for LIS 768. I had good technological experiences with my group members and I felt it was some of the most successful online collaboration I had been involved with yet. We had 2 IM meetings in which we discussed what content we would include, what project we would build using a wiki and who would present what during the presentation. I also found our use of Google Docs interesting. This was the first time I had used the presentation application so there was a bit of a learning curve. Although Google Presentation is simplistic (no fancy bells and whistles) I did find it fairly easy to use and responsive. I wish we had more of a chance to play with the online live presentation chat but it was still nice to use. The one drawback to this project was out use of PBWiki. I found PBWiki clunky, unresponsive, ugly and unintuitive. Help documents were seemed really hard to find and WYSIWYG didn’t seem to work very well at all. I found myself reverting to the original PBWiki code which is simplistic but got the job done and also kept the formatting uniform. I looked at the commercial features of PBWiki and really thought they were lacking. The company that I host from charges just as much as PBWiki but offers a whole lot more as far as server space is concerned and one click installs of various free software. I do have to do more of my own work to get a wiki up and running on my host, but there are an infinite number of configurations and options available (as well as Mediawiki is solid software with no, or very little clunkiness). I would not recommend PBWiki for a wiki project.